TL;DR: Windows Defender had a bug that made certain system calls expensive on CPU cycles when Defender's Real-time Protection feature is enabled. After discovery, Mozilla reported this issue to Microsoft. Microsoft is releasing a patch that should result in lower CPU usage when using Firefox on sites like YouTube (a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted when browsing YouTube in Firefox with the fixed version of Defender).
It seems like the HN submission form truncated the # from the end of the URL I linked to, which linked to the relevant comment. I'll try that here:
As the article mentions, Firefox is not currently implementing the Picture-in-Picture Web API that you linked to. Firefox's implementation is a browser feature only, and not exposed to the web at large.
Disclosure: I work for Mozilla on Firefox. I can say, without hesitation, that we definitely give a damn about protecting the user and protecting the health of the web.
This title is inaccurate. Mozilla is _not_ hiring a developer to work on Thunderbird full-time. See below:
From the post:
"
The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer!
...
Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home. The Thunderbird Council, separate from Mozilla, manages the Project and will direct the software engineer’s work."
> This is because the Mozilla Foundation refused to accept the Tor Project's commits to enhance privacy in the browser.
Actually, I'm pretty sure this is untrue. I'm reasonably certain we're actively working with the Tor Browser developers to get their patches merged into core (but preffed off) so that they don't have to maintain a stack of patches on top of Firefox.
> But people donate, and the people living off that money choose arbitrarily to spend those resources on IOS, that is just plain irresponsible.
Note that when people donate, they're donating to the Mozilla Foundation, an entity that does _not_ work on Firefox directly, but does advocacy, outreach and education work. This is where your donation goes.
Mozilla Corporation (which is solely owned by the Foundation) works on Firefox (Desktop, Android, iOS, Focus, etc), and does not benefit from the donations that are sent to the Foundation. That work is funded almost entirely by revenue generated by partnerships with search providers.
People who want to donate to the corporation do so via patches, bug reports, testing, documentation, evangelism, etc.
(Full-disclosure - I'm a Mozilla Corporation employee, but speaking for myself and not on behalf of the company)
Electrolysis ("e10s") has been enabled by default on the Nightly and Developer Edition* channels, if you'd like to help test it.
* Although we're currently running an A/B test to measure performance differences with e10s enabled and disabled, so you might fall into the disabled cohort when you run Dev Edition. This experiment is scheduled to end in a few days.
That blocksite looks pretty annoying, but according to our Add-on Dev Relations Lead (jorgev), since the tracking in blocksite is "opt in", it doesn't actually violate any of the AMO policies.
"Add-ons should not be allowed that much power" - this is tricky. We want add-ons to be powerful enough that users can customize Firefox to their liking down to the tiniest detail. And yet, we want to make sure that the add-ons are not doing completely evil things to your machine.
Our solution to that problem is code review and static analysis of add-ons that are submitted to AMO. For add-ons that you install outside of AMO... well, you're on your own there.
It's tricky. We do very much want to make the browser safer for our users, and eliminating evil add-ons is high on our list of priorities, but there's a lot of stop energy put against our solutions[2].
I'm not in charge of add-ons, but I the predicament is clear. Add-on authors want the power to make the browser do amazing things. Users want add-ons to do amazing things. Bad actors want add-ons to do evil things. We want to protect the user, but we also want to respect the user's right to do or install whatever they'd like on their machines.
It's a fine balance.
[1]: Which is something our AMO editors do - they review the source of all add-ons that go up to AMO.
(Full disclosure - I'm an engineer that's working on multi-process Firefox).
> Add-ons come in two flavors, "old" and "new" (Jetpack). This feature is only available to "old" add-ons. The direction with Firefox has been to narrow what add-ons can do.
This is false.
SDK (Jetpack) add-ons can do everything that "old" add-ons can do. The SDK just offers nicer APIs to allow add-on authors to do common things, and adds a layer to help protect add-on authors against changes in Firefox's code-base (the SDK has very strict deprecation policies, for example). Another advantage of SDK add-ons is that, if all goes well, very few (if any) SDK-based add-ons will need to be changed in order to work in multi-process Firefox. The SDK API layer will change to accommodate multi-process, and SDK-based add-ons should "just work".
js-ctypes, which this blog post talks about, is very much accessible from SDK-based add-ons[1]. SDK-based add-ons can also get direct access to the same old-style XPCOM components that power "old" add-ons[2].
Nothing about the SDK makes those add-ons weaker - if anything, it makes them more resilient to change.
[1]: Here's a simple SDK add-on I wrote to quickly crash the selected tab in multi-process Firefox: https://github.com/mikeconley/tab-crasher It uses js-ctypes to dereference a null pointer and segfault the content process.
It seems like the HN submission form truncated the # from the end of the URL I linked to, which linked to the relevant comment. I'll try that here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1441918#c82
and
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1441918#c91